Crouching Monkey Hidden Lens
Crouching Monkey Hidden Lens
Crouching Monkey Hidden Lens
To a first-time visitor to Lal Bagh, the monkeys near the lake can be intimidating. Yes they are sometimes a riotous lot and are readily excited if you happen to have food upon you, but they mean no harm. Often, they are just curious.
Taken last year at Lal Bagh. I am in the market for a new camera. Before I buy one, I’ve promised myself to clean up pictures taken with my current camera over last the 2.5 years, and post a hundred of them here. If I cannot, I probably don’t deserve a camera. These two count as one (just like the ones in the last post), taking my tally to 4. Wish me luck.
Pitter-Patter
A rainy dat at coorg
A rainy day at coorg
We woke up from our afternoon siesta to the pitter-patter of raindrops on our room’s roof. It was September, but the rains had still not left Coorg. Perhaps they were making up for their late arrival.
Hangin’ About
Hanging About
Taken at the Dastkar Mela in Delhi last year. My relationship with Indian handicrafts (or for that matter any handicraft) is a photographic one only. I like to look at stuff like this and love to click stuff like this but cannot buy and bring home stuff like this. It adds to clutter and gives dust additional surface area to settle on. Talking of dust, notice the tiny broom in the hand of the doll right behind the one in focus. Perhaps it should have been the main subject of this photograph.
It’s lonely out here
The lonely rooster
“You have 1 post, 1 page, contained within 1 category and 0 tags. You have 1 total comment, 1 approved, 0 spam and 0 awaiting moderation.” Says WordPress. Sure it’s lonely out here at the moment. I hope to remedy this soon - no not by bringing over posts from the older blog - but by writing a bit more regularly.
Bhutan - Last Day - Paro
I close my eyes and fly back in my mind’s eye to the last day of our stay at Bhutan. I have no notes, a few pictures and a memory that is already dented by daily buffetings of city life.
We left our hotel at Wangdue after the usual bread, butter, jam, tea fare. The view from our balcony was sadly the only good part about our stay at the hotel that went by the name - Dragon’s Nest. Thanks to this exotic moniker, the picture of Harry Potter from the cover of Goblet Of Fire would keep flashing before my eyes randomly. An Indian family in the room next door; separated from us only by paper-thin walls, was keen to catch up on their dose of K-serials. जन्मों के प्यासे goes the phrase in Hindi. They were also a family of prodigal snorers, making it very hard for me to sleep. I spent the night turning in an otherwise comfortable bed.
On our way to Paro, we took a short detour to Thimpu and visited the art school there. Anyone can enroll for a four year course at the school after finishing class XII. We saw classes on wood carving, painting, weaving, sculpture and metal craft. The atmosphere was remarkably like what used to be in the physics or chemistry labs in our schools! I am sure that most artisans can make a decent living by doing up the houses and dzongs in Bhutan. While dzongs might be opting for the traditional decor out of cultural reasons, the houses have to do it by law.
The wood carving class at the Thimpu art school
Just a few minutes before entering the main city, I had seen a beautiful prayer wheel at a small square. While I hadn’t stopped the car then, I wanted to revisit it. The prayer wheel was installed inside a covered structure which served as a public space of sorts for old men, women and monks bent by age. The wheel itself was quite interesting and right between the big golden lettering were pictures of demons and snakes that looked straight out of an anniversary issue of Raj Comic’s Nagraj series.
A prayer wheel
Just a few minutes from Paro, we saw another suspension bridge down in a valley. A small dirt track branching downhill off the side of the highway led to the bridge. We walked to it.
A bridge by the roadside
The two towers on each side of the bridge were two-storied. There were stairs inside that allowed you to go to the upper floor - whose walls were covered with beautiful paintings of Buddha, his incarnations, famous disciples and the man responsible for construction of a series of suspension bridges in Bhutan centuries ago.
The paintings inside the towers of the bridge
Our guide informed us that some of the original iron chains used in construction of this bridge were reused during its recent overhaul. The bridge was covered with bamboo thatch - making it easy to cross without feeling giddy.
The Thatched Bridge
Paro has Bhutan’s only airport and soon we were driving parallel to the runway. Our hotel was a cosy little place that served delicious Bhutanese and Indian fare for lunch. For a change we could order à la carte, allowing us to mix adventure of a new local dish (that turned out to be potatoes in melted cheese) with pragmatism of the hard-to-get-wrong Indian daal (that turned out to be very good indeed!).
It was already quite late in the afternoon and we headed straight to the Paro Museum. The building used to serve as a watch tower for the Paro Dzong before being converted into a museum. It was fascinating from inside - though some of the narrow, dark aisles that went in circles made you a little dizzy. If you’ve been to a big museum in India, the museum here will not hold much novelty for you. In fact the stories and depiction of a lot of deities of the Buddhist pantheon felt like they were a straight import from Hinduism. It is easy to overlook the richness, diversity and antiquity of our civilization during our day-today lives, but when you are in a foreign country - that too inside a museum - it is hard not to feel a degree of pride and a certain pang of separation. Still a small (silver?) statue of the Buddhist God of compassion, with hundreds of arms and eleven faces, had superb workmanship that impressed me profoundly.
Paro Museum
Our next stop was the dzong at Paro. Minor repairs were being made inside. Workers applied a fresh coat of paint to the walls and windows.
A wall gets a fresh coat of paint at the Paro Dzong
The paintings on the walls were covered with a thin, yellow, silk cloth. Little monk boys tussled over little monk issues that only little monks could have understood.
Boy monks in a friendly fight
A couple of them sat before a temple selling silk prayer threads. Their faces bore an expression of extreme serenity.
Boy monks at the entrance of a temple in Paro Dzong
Taktsang - a dzong built on a rocky hill and some two hours’ trek from its base - was beyond us already. With a heavy heart, I took picture of the pine trees that lined the road. It was time to head back to the hotel and prepare for next morning’s flight back home.
A pine cone
Paro airport is unlike any airport I have seen to date. I am sure the country’s best artists were employed for doing it up. The construction was very contemporary and mostly used concrete and very little wood, but the paintings were probably the best modern specimens of Bhutan’s traditional style. As we walked to our Druk Air plane, I turned around for one last look at the terminal - it was as if we had just walked out of a temple and not an airport…
Paro Airport
We made sure that we got the window seat on the right. Our stay had been predominantly cloudy, but the sky had cleared up today. Some 30 minutes into the flight, we could see snow capped mountain peaks in a distance. I had a distinct feeling that this was just a beginning with my love affair with the Himalayas.
Bhutan - Day 4 - Wangdue, Punakha
We started early next morning for Wangdue. With more than 6 hours of picturesque drive ahead and my altitude sickness fully gone, I was keenly looking forward to enjoying every moment.
After a few minutes’ drive from Bhumtang, we had an encounter with a herd of Yaks. They were quite scared of our car and would be out of our way in no time. I found them remarkably agile for their size. A yak or two would even gallop downhill in panic but with the car gone and food readily in sight, they would forget all about the scare of just moments ago and resume grazing again.
We drove through patches of rainy weather and occasional sunshine. We drove through valleys and crooked mountain roads.
Crooked mountain roads
We saw mountain tops glistening in the distance - rivulets of rain-water or water from melting snow ran downhill from there. At almost every other sharp turn we would encounter a small stream or a waterfall - small only with respect to the mountains that surrounded us. If one of these waterfalls were to materialize somewhere close to Bangalore it would be one of the biggest tourist attraction in Deccan! Alas the picture below does a poor job of conveying its scale - this waterfall by the roadside was over 75 feet tall!
A random waterfall by the roadside
We saw small houses on the mountains and in the valleys. They had an attached terraced farm, and a private brook. A small covered structure with a prayer wheel inside was often seen over the brook. The water turned the prayer wheel and the wheel tolled the bell, announcing its presence to those passing by.
Valleys, houses, farms
We reached the Wangdue town at 3:00 and headed straight to the dzong there. This was to be our most disappointing experience. The monk quarters were dank and stank of urine, making it it impossible to stand there.
We politely declined the offer to be shown the temple rooms inside this dzong. It was prudent to head to Punakha - ex-capital of Bhutan and some 20 km away from where we were - to visit the famous dzong there while there was still some light left. Just as we were leaving, we ran into a boy who wanted us to take a picture of his. He looked as if all the happiness had abandoned his world. He had walked out of a Charles Dickens novel (think Oliver Twist or Nicholas Nickleby) into this dzong.
A Dickensian hero?
Punakha Dzong has been built near the confluence of two rivers. It had been recently restored and its whitewashed facade exuded a youthful exuberance. Several jacaranda trees that stood in its courtyard were in full bloom. Their purple canopies clearly visible as we approached the dzong.
Punakha Dzong
Once we were at the entrance to the dzong, the sheer scale of its construction hit us. We would have to climb the same terrifying stairs that had been the bane of our existence in all the dzongs. Never before had we encountered them right at the entrance though. Never before were they this high either.
Dizzying scale of Punakha Dzong hit us at its entrance
The paintings on the wall of the dzong looked vibrant and almost freshly done up. The courtyards were clean, airy and lit-up by the beautiful evening light filtering through the clouds. In a courtyard in front of the dzong’s main prayer hall monks fed pigeons pieces of ceremonial cake.
A window Punakha Dzong
Colours inside Punakha Dzong
The pigeons have it nice inside the Dzongs
While we had driven to the dzong, on our way back we’d walk across the river over a bridge and then drive to the hotel from there. The main bridge had been recently renovated, and like everything else here, looked right out of a fairytale.
A fairytale bridge
For reasons, that I am unsure of to this moment, we chose to cross the river on a shabby, bamboo-wood bridge that ran parallel to it. It was almost as if someone had knocked together a ladder in 2 hours and just thrown it across the banks. It was supported in places by pillars made of rock but it still made the suspension bridge that we had crossed yesterday look like a cakewalk. The slats of wood were irregular, at times broken, and often non-existent. Through the gaps between the slats, you could see the river gushing below. It produced a head-spinning illusion of being on a raft and drifting in a direction opposite to the flow of the river. Worse, the bamboo hand railings were coming off in places. I would have preferred a raft indeed!
Hardly a bridge
As we headed to our hotel, sun crept out and painted a valley here and a mountain there in a dusky golden hue.
Dusky golden hue
It was hard not to feel sad at the thought of it practically being our last day in Bhutan tomorrow.